Mobility, Motility and Stillness, part 1

Posted on January 28, 2013 by admin

(Notes from the Detroit workshop, January 2013)

I love trinities. I see them everywhere and love when new ones pop up. Our weekend focus is on one that has just come to me, although it is not totally new: mobility, motility and stillness. This trinity offers us a key to unlocking the secret of yoga. Finding balance and harmony in the first two creates a possible opening into the third, the unbounded infinite open heart. Just as the eternal ‘Now’ is not the absence of time, stillness, as I am using the word here, is not the absence of movement, but the ever-present source of all movement. Patanjali calls this purusha.

We can also another connection that might be helpful. Mobility involves the gross or physical body, the body of weight and mass. Motility is the subtle or energy body with no mass but measurable movement. The causal or ‘bliss’ body (anandamaya kosha) refers to the fields such as gravity and electromagnetism that shape the movements of matter and energy. “Stillness’, as we are using the term is actually the source of all ‘three bodies’ and thus accessible from anywhere at any time. However, the stability of the causal body allows it to be the most likely place from which we can ‘let go’ into the stillness.

Mobility

For those of us who practice and teach a somatic based enquiry, we usually begin with the most tangible, the most accessible: the gross body or body of weight and mass (sthula sharira in Sanskrit). Mobility is the ability of this body to move through space. Animals are mobile. Plants, for the most part are not. Animals have nervous systems which have evolved to organize movements in space. Plants do not have nervous systems. (See the ” i of the Vortex” by Rodolfo Llinas for a brilliant exposition of the evolution of the nervous system.) Animals have muscles and bones and it is through these that most humans discover movement. In a hatha yoga practice, our first goal is usually to optimize the capacity of the body to move. Here, the most simple movements are returned to their naturally elegant, graceful and effortless level of expression.

To keep life simple, we will explore the three fundamental movements of the pelvis in relation to the legs and how the legs and feet provide a stable base for these movements. These are the foundation to the beginning level poses. We will look at sustaining, or staying in a pose for many breaths in the motility section. (There are also situations where restorative poses are necessary at the beginning, with no outer movements, and we will visit that in motility.) Here is a away to introduce elegant mobility to new students.

Tadasana; here we stabilize the feet, and mobilize the ankles, knees and hips. Imagine you are on skis (or ice skates, surfboard, skateboard etc) where your feet play a crucial role in feeling the earth beneath you and your legs are dynamically interacting with gravity. There is a flow of energy linking the joints and muscles as they continuously adapt to the changing terrain. As you stand with feet hip width apart, find this state of being both relaxed and alert and feel it throughout the body. As you stand on your mat, let your ankles, hips and knees move as your feet stay still. Let the whole body feel supported.

When the legs are awake we can add the three basic movements of the pelvis turning around the hip joints, forward flexion/extension (forward and backbending postures), lateral flexion and extension (of the pelvis!) like trikonasana and its cousins, and rotation or twisting. In teaching all levels of yoga students, these three movements are foundational. To begin this pelvic exploration we will add a bonus to the body. Our human tail is very limiting so we will grow a new one, with our imagination and energy.

So, grow yourself a tail. Let your imagination expand. Cats, birds, fish, lizzards, or even a kangaroo are possible options. Feel the energy of the tail extending down and back to offer more support and relief to the spinal muscles. This vector (direction of flow) takes you away from your head. Let it extend even beyond your imaginary tail so it continues on into space.

From tadasana we will now explore forward bending or forward flexion and its complement, extension. Let your tail go back and up to help bring your torso forward and down. Feel the pelvis and hips at the very center of the movement, the femur bones being the fulcrum of the see-saw, so you feel perfectly balanced all the way down. Pause, and then using your tail, return to the upright position. Repeat the cycle again and again, as slowly as possible.

The secret to healthy expressions of mobility is the ability to first feel a pair of even, balanced, complementary movements around a still point, which here are the femur heads. Let the body relax in skier’s tadasana and feel the changes as you move in and out of the forward bend. Take your feet wider apart and explore the same movements. Prasarita padottanasana is the Sanskrit name for the wide leg pose . If you have the flexibility, let your head and or elbows come to the floor as well, but the movements in and out are what is important. Experience many different distances between the feet, not just two. Each will offer new sensations and the possibility of greater ease.

Next comes the lateral or fish body poses, of which triangle pose is the all time greatest. It is in my top three of all time favorite asanas. Imagine a tail, like a fish, extending away from the human tail. Visualize a circle, or even better, concentric circles , and move in and out of the pose riding on the circles like a half-pipe in skiing. Smooth out the movements and the energy flow. Try the same in parsvakonasana and ardha chandrasana. Remember to do both sides equally. We are not staying in the postures yet. That will come in the motility section. Try to find a clear clean circle of energy in the side plane. This is where trikonasana shines!

Finally we rotate. Because the legs can inhibit pelvic rotation, the bet way to develop mobility here is to use ardha chandrasa as a starting point, using blocks if necessary, keep the standing leg till and rotate the pelvis around to parvrtta ardha chandrasana. Again, we are not yet staying in the pose, but exploring and liberating the mobility in the body so repeat back and forth as slowly and smoothly as possible. (Great thanks to Onecenteryoga in Asheville, NC for the photos).

The standing poses offer the best leverage for opening the hip joint mobility. We are not necessarily trying to greatly increase range of motion as we are are looking to create balanced, elegant centered movements around a stable base. Ardha chandrasana can be an entry into one legged dog pose where we use the hip mobility of help lengthen the spine and open the shoulders. From here, ‘flipping’ the dog uses the pelvis mobility and also takes you deeper into the organic movements we will discuss in motility, (coming in part 2). Practice moving in and out as slowly as possible to increase sensitivity and elegance.

Caryn McHose Workshop pt 1

Posted on November 7, 2012 by admin

On Sunday, November 4th, Caryn came to The Watertown Center for the Healing Arts to present a somatic workshop”Explorations in Sound, Movement and Breath”. With over 40 years of experience in teaching creative movement, Caryn’s unique approach to somatic awakening dives headlong into the sacred feminine to reconnect students to the oldest and most cosmically aligned regions of their body/mind.

All cultures have traditions around collective movement and song and we began with an enquiry into group movement. There is something powerful about moving in unison in a group, of dissolving into a larger field in flow, rhythm and harmony, of discovering individuality while remaining in a multiplicity of relationships with the other bodies and the surrounding space. The sacred feminine is about expanding into relationships while strengthening a healthy sense of self.

Then we explored the relationships to ground and space to awaken the gravity response system, a primal, pre-cognitive experience of ‘where am I’ quite different form the ‘who am I ‘ mind state. Gravity or ground is found as a felt sense of weight, through bones and fluids, organs and cells, and always orients downward into the center of Mother Earth. Its cultivation leads to what Patanjali calls ‘sthira’, stability, in his classic description of posture, sthira sukham asanam, posture requires stability and freedom. (Later in the day we focused on feeling a deep sense of grounding through two of the tarsal bones, the navicular (‘the navigator’) and cuboid, to bring even more stability to standing. For most these bones are un-felt, un-conscious, un-moving.) The felt sense of weight builds a healthy sense of self the is able to surrender to the ‘no-self’ field of the living cosmos.

The complement to weight is the felt sense of space, of lightness, of levity that allows us to move out into the world, to be in relationships, to feel spacious and open. We orient to space through ‘vectors’, an extension of energy or intention in a specific direction, with a specific magnitude of energy. Reaching out to pick up a pencil with my hand is one example. B.B.S. Iyengar in trikonasana is demonstrating a multiplicity of vectors. The obvious ones include each arm, each leg, his fingers and toes. But also, his eyes are vectoring upward, his head and tail are extending in opposite directions, his heart is coming right out of the photo to the viewer. This helps explain the nature of complementary or opposite vectors the allow a centered stillness amidst the intensity. Head and tail, right and left arms or legs, and front and back are three obvious possibilities.

Although we did not work with this on Sunday, here is a clip of Caryn demonstrating using vectors in movement in an exploration known as the flight of the eagle, which,as you yogis will recognize, comes from suryanamaskar. Notice how space invites her to move through knees, eyes and skull, fingers, arms, legs and kidneys.

In class we used knees, elbows, different arm bones to experience the sense of reaching out into space from many areas of the body, sometimes working with a partner to ‘entice’ a movement with a direction. Most interesting for me was using the various sensory modalities to experience both reaching out into space and receiving sensation as ‘weight’. This was especially obvious in listening to the sounds of the bowls she was using in the afternoon session. If the sounds came to me, which was the familiar, I could feel the sounds coming in and grounding. If I ‘reached out’ to the sounds with my sense of hearing, not with tension, but with an expansion, I found my skull bones opening sideways and me ‘ears’ becoming huge. This was a total surprise and utterly delightful.

The continuing theme was to release all sense of effort, the ‘gripper/zipper’ state and feel how pure perception/sensation, evoked by orientation to space and ground, allowed movements and openings that were truly effortless. Nothing extra needed. We used this perception/extension process to liberate the hands, arms and shoulder girdle, and feet legs and pelvic girdle, to discover our ‘fish body’. Detailed explorations included differentiating radius and ulna and tibia and fibula to find the inter-osseus membranes. By reaching radius down into the hand and the ulna toward the elbow, the forearms expand and new channels of energy emerge in all arm movements. By rotating the tibia and fibula in relationship to each other, first opening the front compartment in plantar flexion, and then the back compartment in dorsiflexion, the feet and lower legs awaken in new ways.

We also discovered the angle of the rami connecting the pubic bones and the sitting bones are diagonal and in women this angle can be quite large. This creates more vectors when coming into forward flexion of the hips. In finding balance on one leg, stability can increase when the ramus of the standing leg is drawn into the midline of the body and the cuboid and navicular bones release downward. (see above)

(In part 2 we will visit the afternoon sound explorations into organs and the third ventricle of the brain)

Gabrielle Roth

Posted on October 31, 2012 by admin

A wild, beautiful, shamanic visionary has moved on. Gabriell Roth, dancer, musician, teacher, somanaut extraordinaire passed away last week from lung cancer. This is excerpted from an article on huffingtonpost.com. entitled “The Spiritual Power of Dance.”

“Each of us is a moving center, a space of divine mystery. And though we spend most of our time on the surface in the daily details of ordinary existence, most us hunger to connect to this space within, to break through to bliss, to be swept away into something bigger than us.

As a young dancer, I made the transition from the world of steps and structures to the world of transformation and trance by exposure to live drumming. The beats, the patterns, the rhythms kept calling me deeper and deeper into my dance.

Being young, wild and free, it didn’t dawn on me that in order to go into deep ecstatic places, I would have to be willing to transform absolutely everything that got in my way. That included every form of inertia: the physical inertia of tight and stressed muscles; the emotional baggage of depressed, repressed feelings; the mental baggage of dogmas, attitudes and philosophies. In other words, I’d have to let it all go — everything.

At the time, I was teaching movement to tens of thousands of people and, in them, I began to witness my own body/spirit split. Between the head and feet of any given person is a billion miles of unexplored wilderness. I yearned to know what was going on in that wilderness, not only in me, but in everyone else as well.

And so, movement became both my medicine and my meditation. Having found and healed myself in its wild embrace, I became a mapmaker for others to follow, but not in my footsteps, in their own. Many of us are looking for a beat, something solid and rooted where we can take refuge and begin to explore the fluidity of being alive, to investigate why we often feel stuck, numb, spaced-out, tense, inert, and unable to stand up or sit down or unscramble the screens that reflect our collective insanity.

The question I ask myself and everyone else is, “Do you have the discipline to be a free spirit?” Can we be free of all that binds and bends us into a shape of consciousness that has nothing to do with who we are from moment to moment, from breath to breath?…”

Why not. Go for it!